On MUDding

By Jordan Kronick

I'll start with a little bit of background as to what I'm talking about. Question one is often, "what the hell is a MUD"? Well, dear friend, MUD stands for Multiple User Dungeon (or Domain). There's some other variations on what MUD means, and there are also MOOs and MUSHs, which I'll get into a bit later, if I'm feeling masochistic. So what the hell is that, you ask? Well imagine a chat room. I'm sure everyone can do that. Now, imagine thousands of chat rooms, which you can move between by "moving" in cardinal directions. Say, a few hundred chat rooms which each have the theme of different parts of ancient Rome. This is the basis. This is what a MUD is at it's core. It goes beyond that, though. In addition to standing around and talking, there's things to do! You can go slay a dragon, solve a quest, get drunk, or a billion other little things. Yeah, that's right. It's a game composed entirely of text. It is the origin of all the big online rping games like EverQuest or UltimaOnline. Which brings me to the first point that I'll explore here. In a world where EQ and UO are available, and anyone can have a brilliant full-color world of dragons and quests and alchohol, why play a MUD? Surely it's more than just nostalgia. I'm going to start a new paragraph before I get carried away.

Whew.. okay.. Many thousands of people across the world still play MUDs. While I can't speak for everyone else, I play because I believe the MUD to be the finest example of an online environment. The graphics-based games are just that. They are based on cool graphics, not the people behind the graphics. MUDs are simple. Everything about your character is an expression of yourself. In the graphics based games, your personality is lost behind the colourful exterior you present to the world. In a MUD, people only get from you what you give them. It has to be stressed that another thing that makes a MUD better is that everyone who plays a MUD has something in common with the people around them. It's a retro-tech feeling. It's the kind of thing vinyl collectors have. It feels good to kick it old-school. We connect to each other in a different way than graphics gamers do. We're making sure that something old and wonderful dosen't get lost in a sea of new games which may or may not be better. More and more I think it's appropriate that the original name for the MUD I play is "Defiance". Maybe they knew what it was going to be, when they named it. Maybe not.

Going back to my first essay on this site, MUDs are clearly a strong form of escapism. In a MUD you create a character, and you lend parts of your personality to that character. You are able to idealize yourself, and make that person a walking, talking construct. Even if it is just a few words on a screen. Escapism, as I've said before, can be very dangerous for those of us who cannot control it. I remember when I first started MUDding, I was about 13 years old. I told my older sister (who was in college at that point) that I had found MUDs and she told me to be careful. She said that she'd seen many people at college who were ruined by MUDs. She told me they are addicting, and that I should be very careful that I don't get sucked in and start ignoring other parts of my life. Well, I didn't really get sucked in by MUDs. I got sucked in by games in general. Before highschool, I still loved games. I played a lot of Monopoly. I played a little Magic, it having just been released. I even had played a couple roleplaying games. Once I got to highschool, I think I felt that I needed to escape from the harsh social reality of school. I became the game-addicted nut who's writing this stuff today. I know that I owe a great deal of that to MUDs. It's one thing to have a game you can play with some friends down at the game store. It's another thing to have a game you can play any time of day, no matter what. With a MUD, the temptation is always there because the game is always there. I stayed up every night, as late as I could, playing MUDs. Then I'd drag myself out of bed and go to school. I'd skip class to go play Magic or hacky sack. After school, I went to the game store. When it closed, I went home and got on the computer. That's what I did for a few years. I'm not going to continue to relate my life story here. That's for another time, and this is for MUDs. Suffice to say that I've learned how addicting MUDs can be, and how dangerous.

I suppose I'm making MUDs out to be pretty bad, here. They aren't, I swear. MUDs are just like any other game, in that they can take away your life. They are unlike any other game in that when they do so, they give you another life in return. Who wouldn't want to trade their day-to-day existence for a life as a character in a fantasy world?